I wonder if this is how God feels
As much as I would love my two dogs to love each other the way I love each of them, they keep fighting over toys, space, and being the first to get my attention and affection. These dogs have been conditioned to having the world revolve around them, and now jealousy has emerged as a disease that disrupts the harmony of the house.
They're at a point where they mostly tolerate each other and can play with each other on occasion, but the competition is a repugnant trait. You know they're each sweet dogs deep down, but with each other they mostly see an opponent. I've begun neglecting them whenever they start competing for my attention, thinking that they'll realize that they have each other rather than relying solely on me.
Maybe that's why so many prayers go unanswered. Greed is a disgusting thing that programs us to expecting that life has to be all good all the time, and so we take more than we need to make sure we never have to feel what it's like to struggle. It's in this self-serving pursuit that we fail to see what we take away from and deny others.
Being a social outcast makes you more in tune to this kind of behavior. You see the way people compete with each other for attention, trying to gain by manipulation instead of earning through work and consistency. It's hard to blame them. It feels good to get positive attention, whether we deserve it or not.
But in trying to come to peace with my sense of invisibility and irrelevance, I've come to realize that there's a beauty to our struggles. We learn more from our failures than from our successes, and the things we learn help us to be more aware, more sensitive, and ultimately more loving and forgiving. Even God had to flood the Earth and start over in the Bible.
That's really the biggest thing stopping me from pure misanthropy, is our ability to learn. Just about everyone has toxic traits, and ugliness is inherent in every person. Growing up around people who had no compunction against hiding their ugliness from me, it spoiled how I perceived and what I grew to expect from people. It's like seeing how the sausage is made before you ever had one. It set the precedent for my relationships with people, and it's become my burden to learn to see the beauty in them the way I see beauty in nature, in science, in art and technology.
It's been one of my more fanciful theories recently that humanity's ability to specialize, to divide and conquer, to make ourselves the dominant species regardless of our environment, etc.; is no accident. In diving into the inner-workings of deep-learning and machine-learning algorithms, methods we use to teach computers and software programs to learn how to do things, I realize that it mimics how humans learn things, especially in early childhood and adolescence. We have to learn what the wrong ways are in order to figure out the right thing in the end.
It's kinda nice to imagine the unimaginable vastness of the universe as a computer system of sorts, where different solar systems and galaxies and planets are all computer algorithms trying to figure something out. They're receptacles for data to figure out what works and what doesn't, and maybe the deadness of space is only there to remind us of our own fragility. Even with the most sophisticated technology on the planet, there are still occasional bugs and glitches for us to work on. For all the progress humanity has made thus far, there's still more ways to go.
It does make you wonder that if life is just a complex algorithm and progress comes incrementally, what is the end goal of all our suffering? Humanity is the only species with the technology to prevent our own extinction, but we're also the only species with the technology to end it all. It's a precarious situation that I don't believe is a coincidence. At some point we're going to have to choose love over division, else we're just a failed algorithm destined to cosmological obsolescence
They're at a point where they mostly tolerate each other and can play with each other on occasion, but the competition is a repugnant trait. You know they're each sweet dogs deep down, but with each other they mostly see an opponent. I've begun neglecting them whenever they start competing for my attention, thinking that they'll realize that they have each other rather than relying solely on me.
Maybe that's why so many prayers go unanswered. Greed is a disgusting thing that programs us to expecting that life has to be all good all the time, and so we take more than we need to make sure we never have to feel what it's like to struggle. It's in this self-serving pursuit that we fail to see what we take away from and deny others.
Being a social outcast makes you more in tune to this kind of behavior. You see the way people compete with each other for attention, trying to gain by manipulation instead of earning through work and consistency. It's hard to blame them. It feels good to get positive attention, whether we deserve it or not.
But in trying to come to peace with my sense of invisibility and irrelevance, I've come to realize that there's a beauty to our struggles. We learn more from our failures than from our successes, and the things we learn help us to be more aware, more sensitive, and ultimately more loving and forgiving. Even God had to flood the Earth and start over in the Bible.
That's really the biggest thing stopping me from pure misanthropy, is our ability to learn. Just about everyone has toxic traits, and ugliness is inherent in every person. Growing up around people who had no compunction against hiding their ugliness from me, it spoiled how I perceived and what I grew to expect from people. It's like seeing how the sausage is made before you ever had one. It set the precedent for my relationships with people, and it's become my burden to learn to see the beauty in them the way I see beauty in nature, in science, in art and technology.
It's been one of my more fanciful theories recently that humanity's ability to specialize, to divide and conquer, to make ourselves the dominant species regardless of our environment, etc.; is no accident. In diving into the inner-workings of deep-learning and machine-learning algorithms, methods we use to teach computers and software programs to learn how to do things, I realize that it mimics how humans learn things, especially in early childhood and adolescence. We have to learn what the wrong ways are in order to figure out the right thing in the end.
It's kinda nice to imagine the unimaginable vastness of the universe as a computer system of sorts, where different solar systems and galaxies and planets are all computer algorithms trying to figure something out. They're receptacles for data to figure out what works and what doesn't, and maybe the deadness of space is only there to remind us of our own fragility. Even with the most sophisticated technology on the planet, there are still occasional bugs and glitches for us to work on. For all the progress humanity has made thus far, there's still more ways to go.
It does make you wonder that if life is just a complex algorithm and progress comes incrementally, what is the end goal of all our suffering? Humanity is the only species with the technology to prevent our own extinction, but we're also the only species with the technology to end it all. It's a precarious situation that I don't believe is a coincidence. At some point we're going to have to choose love over division, else we're just a failed algorithm destined to cosmological obsolescence
31-35, M
